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Just a little bananas about my bananas

Not that apples have been totally displaced as healthy. The old saw of “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is still as true as it ever was.

After all, roughage is roughage, whatever the form.

And the visual of apples being offered as gifts or bribes is an ancient one.

However, at Wimbledon, it was not apples tucked under the referee’s perch, but a couple of bananas, that the TV cameras briefly espied.

Who ate them? We’ll never know. I did learn that bananas eaten shortly before exercise are most beneficial.

Daughter Tamela has had me on a breakfast menu of yogurt, pineapple, strawberries and blueberries, flax seed and yes, bananas.

All this is to make me healthy, wealthy and wise. Tamela is an optimist of the first order.

I have become a pseudo expert on the care and shelf life of bananas, simply because, I hate mushy bananas.

Mushy bananas are well, they are mushy. Great for smoothies, banana pudding and that delicious addition to anyone’s diet, banana bread, but yucky bananas eaten straight out of the peel are an affront to the palate.

I am not alone. In one supermarket, bananas were grouped into a pile of “Eat Later” and “Eat Now.”

Clever.

Are the organic bananas priced at a third more per pound healthier? Sweeter?

The modern history of bananas is brief but interesting. Minor Keith, Brooklyn born, went to Costa Rica in the 1870s to work on a railroad project for his uncle Henry Meiggs.

Looking for an inexpensive way to feed his workers, he planted banana cuttings next to the railroad tracks. In that tropical climate,they grew swiftly and were found to indeed be a nutritional part of the crew’s diet.

By the 1920s, bananas were touted in the United States as a beneficial first food for infants and from there, the consumption of bananas took off worldwide.

United Fruit, a company that dominated the economic as well as the political life of Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica, initiated one of the most successful PR ads with its cartoon character Senorita Chiquita Banana based on the celebrated entertainer, Carmen Miranda.

The machinations of the companies like United Fruit and Dole which interfered with the governments of these Central American countries gave us the catch phrase, “Banana Republic.”

Banana, the fruit with the bland almost innocuous but immediately identifiable flavor, has created many myths along the way.

For years, comedians have depended on a pratfall caused by a slippery banana peel to bring a laugh from the audience.

Fact: It takes a good while for a banana peel to rot before it becomes slippery.